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Gordon Brown will today sought to blunt the Tory attack on wasteful public spending with a promise to slash the cost of senior civil servants and cull the number of quangos.
In a speech delivered this morning, the prime minister announced new public sector "efficiency savings" worth £3bn.
£1.3bn of savings are expected to come from "streamlining" Whitehall, which is expected to mean job losses and relocations to the regions.
Brown said: "In order to protect the frontline services we value at a time when budgets are tighter it means we need to do what households up and down the country do to prioritise the necessities and postpone the things we can do without.
"The proposals we are setting out in this plan - which is just one element of our efforts to reduce the deficit - will go further than we have ever gone before in streamlining central government."
And the Cabinet Office this morning published full details of plans designed to save £12bn over the next four years, including £3bn identified since the Budget in April.
Programmes also under threat include a multi-billion-pound NHS IT programme that chancellor Alistair Darling has earmarked to be binned.
But unions have attacked the government for planning "irresponsible" cuts in civil service jobs.
Jonathan Baume, general secretary of the civil service union FDA, said: "It is likely that, in the first period of a new Parliament, ministers will need all of the currently available resources to take forward manifesto commitments and likely reforms to public services in the coming decade, even if the senior civil service eventually contracts in size as these reforms bed down."
The announcement comes ahead of Wednesday's pre-Budget report.
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